Trek Glowacki made a cool blog post about the switch of SI539 from Ruby to Python. Trek has been involved with SI539 in various roles for about 2.5 years and he is the smartest Ruby/Rails guy I know.
Here is his post (read this first):
http://wonderfullyflawed.com/2008/09/08/python-for-all-sure-why-not
Here is my response:
Great post Trek. I agree with 90% of it. I am always nervous about changing the world by teaching something that is “better” but not widely accepted. This way SI graduates are unprepared for their jobs when they come out of school – but they are well prepared for advocating for a future state that may or may not happen.
Frankly the switch from Ruby to Python in SI539 was because someone made a comment to me about how useful Ruby was – and I felt kind of bad teaching something with a small market share that was very elegant. But this might be a cool future state: SI502 teaches Python and in a future semester – I teach SI502 more efficiently so I can get some basic App Engine into SI502 – particularly to reinforce the essence of the Request Response cycle and show how the browser and web servers interact to make the “Web”. At that point we could make SI539 move more quickly just switch SI539 back to Ruby and even turn SI539 back to a project course. I assure you that I still have all my Ruby slides in place and with RUby 2.0 maybe SitePoint will keep a book in print for more than 3-4 months :) In this future world – it would be nice to teach Ruby 2.0 and teach it at a high level abstraction that you like. Having the nasty nuts and bolts well in hand having learned the CGI-like world of App Engine – students would be better prepared for the level of abstraction that they would encounter in “Trek’s – Ruby on Rails – The One True Way” :). That all could be really really cool.
We need to solidly teach HTML, basic programming, and the request response cycle in SI502 – and then SI539 could take off from there.
This dialog needs to continue as I am sure it will.